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A Vancouver man was denied entry into the United States after a US Customs and Border Patrol officer read his profiles on the gay hookup app Scruff and the website BBRT.
[...] André, a 30-year-old Vancouver set decorator who declined to give his full name for fear of retaliation from US Customs, describes the experience as "humiliating."[He] says he was planning to visit his boyfriend, who was working in New Orleans. But when he was going through Customs preclearance at Vancouver airport last October, he was selected for secondary inspection, where an officer took his phone, computer and other possessions, and demanded the passwords for his devices.
"I didn't know what to do. I was scared, so I gave them the password and then I sat there for at least an hour or two. I missed my flight," André says. "He came back and just started grilling me. 'Is this your email?' and it was an email attached to a Craigslist account for sex ads. He asked me, 'Is this your account on Scruff? Is this you on BBRT?' I was like, 'Yes, this is me.'"
[...] "I could tell just by his nature that he had no intentions of letting me through. They were just going to keep asking me questions looking for something," he says. "So I asked for the interrogation to stop. I asked if I go back to Canada am I barred for life? He said no, so I accepted that offer."
A month later, André attempted to fly to New Orleans again. This time, he brought what he thought was ample proof that he was not a sex worker: letters from his employer, pay stubs, bank statements, a lease agreement and phone contracts to prove he intended to return to Canada.
When he went through secondary inspection at Vancouver airport, US Customs officers didn't even need to ask for his passwords — they were saved in their own system. But André had wiped his phone of sex apps, browser history and messages, thinking that would dispel any suggestion he was looking for sex work. Instead, the border officers took that as suspicious.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @04:42PM
Yep. Same thing happened in reverse with Obama.
The black community was the most homophobic group of any significant size in the country, including evangelicals, with something like an 80/20 split against/for marriage equality. But within weeks of Obama officially endorsing marriage equality, it went to about 40/60.
Same thing with trump's putinism. Republican support for putin more than tripled since 2014 [politico.com] - 10% favorable to 37% this past december.
I think the republican meltdown is due to two reasons - (1) the authoritarians have colonized the party, it started with LBJ's support for civil rights - the republican party made a deliberate play to attract disaffected racist democrats (e.g. the southern strategy) so now there are a disproportionate number of naturally hateful people in the party. The rest are faced with the hard decision to abandon their tribe over principles that don't really affect them on a daily basis. Its easier to give up those principles than it is to make that leap into the unknown. It is nowhere near as risky as literally abandoning your tribe on the savanna to live on your own, but people still feel like it is a big deal.